Come Vote On My Next Sound Design Tutorial Series!

After doing 4 substantive Ableton tutorial series, taking a long “time out” to focus on the rest of my life as well as redesigning my site, it’s time to start brainstorming the next product. This time around, I’m going to do things a little differently: I want you guys to help me narrow down what [...]
Designing Sound’s Featured Artist for August: Rob Nokes

Miguel at Designing Sound always does a fantastic job finding interesting sound designers to interview, and this August’s featured artist, Rob Nokes is no exception. Besides his impressive movie credits, Rob also co-founded the online library portion of SoundDogs.com. According to Miguel’s post, the feature will include some tips on field recording and sound editing, [...]
5 Excellent Live Performance Tips from Morgan Sully

I was just reading Morgan Sully’s excellent “Memeshift” site when I came upon his post covering 5 live performance tips. I see countless threads on the Ableton forum and elsewhere with people agonizing over which performance-ready laptop to buy, whether the Launchpad is comparable to the APC for live control, etc., but people who have [...]
New Site, New Look, Better Functionality!

Hey everyone, Thanks to receiving loads of constructive feedback over the last year about my site, I have greatly simplified the design to be far more user friendly than it was before. Too many people were having issues with the shopping cart software I was previously using, so I’ve switched to a simpler, slightly more [...]
Blue Tinted Screen Issue on Aluminum Macbook Pro
I know many of my customers use the newest generation Macbook and Macbook Pro laptops with Ableton Live, so I thought I’d pass this on. After a little more than a year owning the Macbook Pro, my screen randomly took on a blue tint. My immediate reaction was panic and worry considering that the laptop [...]
The Covert Operators "Clip Mapper"
I've been speaking with Bjorn of The Covert Operators on and off for the last few weeks about his latest Max4Live project, the "Clip Mapper." He described it to me in broad terms but I must admit that the details a were a bit fuzzy for me. I'm not a Max/MSP guy by any stretch [...]
Want Some Free Samples for your Multimedia Project? #twsfx
Matt Pacyga and I have teamed up to release some free sample downloads resulting from our respective field recording experiments. Matt has put together a superb set of crunches and splats which originally emanated from his kitchen and some very unlucky food items. The recordings are high quality and super-creative, so I highly encourage you [...]
Going the Extra Mile for Unique Timbres: Part 2
Continuing from the last post, let’s take a look at some more sound-shaping tools that will aid us in our quest to develop unique timbres. As usual, I’ll be using Ableton Live to illustrate when needed. Gate Combined with Effects Automation Although generally used as a corrective device to remove excess noise between sounds [...]
Going the Extra Mile for Unique Timbres: Part 1
I thought it would be fun to put together a small list of useful timbral-shaping tools. They are presented in no particular order along with a few words on how I like to use them. I tend to refer to a similar list in my head whenever I’m trying to come up with a creative [...]
Letting Necessity Guide Your Sound Design
This time I’d like to focus on how an instrument or sound effect develops along with the composition. Last week I mentioned that many device presets contain too much frequency content to easily fit into a mix with other instruments. This generally means that judicious use of subtractive EQ is required to tame these complex [...]






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